¶ Matins: What if the Christianists had a book fair and nobody bought? That’s apparently what happened in Dallas last weekend. Marjorie Kehe reports, at the Christian Science Monitor.

¶ Lauds: Anne Wilkes Tucker, the Houston MFA curator who has bought a print of the Mannie Garcia image from which Shepard Fairey drew his iconic but controversial (because appropriated) poster of President Obama, gets near to the hearts of a couple of concepts about art and performance.

¶ Prime: A look at Esquire’s slideshow of “the 50 Most Stylish Men“ may explain why most American men have all the flair of navel lint.  

¶ Tierce: It’s crazy, I know, but as tent cities such as this one in Fresno pile up, I can’t help wishing that the National Guard could help.

¶ Sext: Now I get what ideography is all about. “The Little Red Riding Hood,” as informatively retold by Tomas Nilsson. (via  The Morning News)

¶ Nones: One thing that Imperial China and Party China share is an obsession with truth control. Example: “China fury at US military report.” 

¶ Vespers: I stoutly resist the temptation to observe that the world is obviously going to the dogs, &c; but when I read Mary McCarthy’s 1962 review of Nabokov’s Pale Fire, unearthed at The New Republic by  The Morning News, it’s hard not to fulminate a little around the edges.

¶ Compline: Sara Rimer advances a cause that has most of us old folks wondering why we weren’t taught about home-office management when we were kids. It’s hard to learn at sixty! (Not that Ms Rimer is anywhere near sixty!)

Oremus…

§ Matins. My bet is that hot-air religiosity isn’t going to survive eighteen months into the current administration. Barack Obama visibly redefines, every time that he appears before the public, the godly man.

§ Lauds. In response to Luc Sante’s claim that “a child or a robot or a chimpanzee” could have taken Mr Garcia’s photograph, Ms Tucker muses,

“Would we have collected Mannie’s photograph by itself without the Fairey poster? I don’t know.”

Still, she said she strongly disagreed with attributing Mr. Garcia’s success to dumb luck. “When Willie Mays was exactly in the outfield where the ball came down, that was not an accident,” she said. “Photojournalists are like athletes in that way.”

That’s it exactly. Given the right conditions, anyone can hit a hole-in-one at golf. But only a champ can be expected to hit one (and that not very often). A photojournalist is someone who is there when it’s crucial to be there, as a matter of professional routine. As such, photographers who work on the fly — Mr Garcia had no idea that his was the image that Mr Fairey had used until it was pointed out to him — are better thought of as performers than as artists.

Shepard Fairey’s work is in a different vein. Not better or worse, but different. Like those photographers whose elaborate consciousness of their images radiates from the print (Walker Evans, William Eggleston, and, just to name someone I’m not crazy about  but of whom this is even more true, Edward Weston), Mr Fairey’s work is not possibly accidental, or the work of a child, a robot, or a chimpanzee.

§ Prime. Although some of the gents are well turned-out, and the show climaxes with a flush of Cary Grants, what most of these men have is what used to be called Rude Good Health. Good bones and great teeth make it possible to overlook the drabbest T shirt.

Style, however, is all about what you can do when Mother Nature has not been so generous. That’s why, to my mind, the most stylish human being of the Twentieth Century was Anna Piaggi.

§ Tierce. As a way of federalizing poverty, the more effectively to deal with it, units of the National Guard could be retooled into a homeless service, turning shantytowns into clean and safe camps, and operating efficient schools and hospitals.

§ Sext. One does have to wonder how well this droll animation would tell the famous “fairy tale” to children who had never heard it before. And the VW van digression shows how easily this sort of thing can go off topic — presenting “information” rather than the real thing.

§ Nones. Why draw attention to the matter with show of “fury”? If the Chinese want to contest the American evaluation of East Asian affairs, anger is hardly reassuring.

For our part, I certainly hope nobody in Washington believes that China’s Central Country project has anything to do with “communism.”

§ Vespers. It’s almost as good as re-reading the novel itself. I’ve read Pale Fire twice already, the second time rather diligently scanning line by line of the title poem. McCarthy’s writing is so clear and yet so thorough that the very room fills with the stink of Kinbote’s ravings. And her imagination has such wide-ranging access that I’m reminded that I went about proposing her, when I was still young enough to get away with such scampery, as the best American novelist of the last century.

Tell me: who’s reviewing books at that pitch today?

§ Compline. Of course, there were no home offices fifty years ago, not even in the homes that had “offices.” There were secretaries!

Having a secretary makes life much easier not so much because someone else is doing the filing as because it spares you the need to learn what kind of paper-management system works best for you. A good secretary will remind you of important matters that you might have overlooked. They haven’t figured out how to get computers to do that yet. No, they really have not. It’s way too easy to slam the door in the computer’s face. Try that on a secretary, and you’ll be looking for a replacement, plus you won’t know where anything is.  

Bon weekend à tous!

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
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